We know for a fact she must be cramped; there are double the amount of people living up there as there are on our half of the whole, and it’s tight down here already. I imagine she shares her room with an adult couple—staying just slightly out of the way, perhaps in the corner with a Dora the Explorer doll, or more likely, a portable play station. I imagine when they want to make love, they shoo her into another room with a perfectly reasonable seeming excuse. “Papi needs to cut mami’s toe nails; if it sounds like she’s hurt, it’s only because she doesn’t cut them enough!”
Danny says she’s the princess of the house and is the only one with her own room; toys everywhere, books and single pieces of paper strewn around carelessly (she knows where everything is).
There’s a tiny bike in the driveway, which must be hers but never moves. Danny found the chains rusty.
One thing we do know is that she has a little brother; two, three tops. It’s often impossible to tell who is screaming—children’s’ lungs can do surprising things--but she likes being an older sister, and pretends her brother is her live doll. She spends most of her time with him while madre cooks, cleans, then takes a break from cooking, cleaning. She is not the kind of child constantly asking “what is there to do? Soy Abburido!” She’s also not the kind of child who worships television; Dora is the only show she really watches, but occasionally she gets sucked into the banal celebrity dance shows her mami and papi take guilty pleasure in (she’s too young to understand it, but loves to watch the dresses fly around).
But her absolute favorite activity—above and beyond anything else; bath time. Her Barbie dolls become mermaids, the bath faucet a waterfall. The yellowed, once white walls of the tub are limestone cliffs for Barbie to jump off romantically into Ken.
I wonder what a seven-ish year olds idea of romance is.
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One day we see mama bringing a basket of laundry to the car, little imaginative-child-above-us in tow, and she’s whining. She doesn’t want to go to the laundry mat. (No one wants to go to the laundry mat.) She’s crying, pulling on mami’s hand, pouting, being very difficult. Danny and I sit on the steps, out of sight; smoking our cancerous Parliaments, silently rejoicing that we haven’t been pregnant, don’t have a baby.
Suddenly we don’t like the little girl.
All that noise upstairs is her stomping her little feet, being a brat, whining about her mom wanting her to be organized—only so life can be easier on everyone.
The Barbies in the tub become a nuisance, nothing but a pointy annoyance.
As it turns out the stomping upstairs is nothing but our little girl throwing fits; dropping onto all fours and pounding them in tandem. The reverie is all but gone, and now all we can do is pound the broom stick against the ceiling in protest…
